


You're My Playground Love

by finkpishnets



Category: Bandom, Panic At The Disco
Genre: Gen, M/M, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-10
Updated: 2010-06-10
Packaged: 2017-10-28 12:51:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/308063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/finkpishnets/pseuds/finkpishnets
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"That poor boy," Spencer’s mom says later, whilst he and Ryan do the dishes. "Trying to take his own life. I blame the parents." The Virgin Suicides AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You're My Playground Love

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the hc_bingo prompt 'attempted suicide'.

Spencer Smith has lived opposite the Urie house his whole life. His mother always exchanges ‘hello’s with Mrs Urie when they pass in the street and then talks about how religiously fanatical the family is behind closed doors. He remembers playing on his front lawn with Ryan and watching as the eldest son went off to college, the second following to join the church shortly afterwards. Remembers the two girls marrying in the same year.

The youngest child, Brendon, is Spencer’s age but he doesn’t think they’ve ever even said ‘hi’ to each other. They go to the same high school, have the same math teacher, but it’s a big town and Spencer has always had Ryan and later Jon, and besides, Brendon Urie has always been too cheerful, too restless.

Spencer’s never really thought about it much.

And then the ambulance sirens interrupt dinner one night, and suddenly it’s the only thing Spencer can think about.

 

+

 

“That poor boy,” Spencer’s mom says later, whilst he and Ryan do the dishes. “Trying to take his own life. I blame the parents.”

Ryan looks up and catches Spencer’s eye, and Spencer’s pretty sure he’s wearing the exact same expression. His parents continue talking, exchanging opinions and rumor, but neither of them are listening anymore, too busy trying to make sense of what’s just been said.

Jon calls them later that evening, when Ryan’s still sprawled across Spencer’s bedroom floor, and he tells them that Pete Wentz heard from Joe Trohman that Brendon Urie was found in the bathtub, razor blade in the toilet. They sit in silence for a while, the phone pressed between them and Jon’s breathing on the other end of the line and think about what would drive him to do it, what he looked like when his parents found him.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Jon says eventually, reluctantly hanging up, and Spencer and Ryan stay where they are, the dead phone line buzzing between them until Spencer’s dad comes and tells them it’s time for Ryan to go home.

 

+

 

They spend the next morning sitting on the sidewalk outside the Smith’s front door, watching the Urie house in the vain hope that they’ll see something, _anything_ to clue them in to the events of the previous evening. At one point Mr and Mrs Urie come out and get in their station wagon, drive off down the road, and Ryan points out that they’re probably going to the hospital.

“The other Urie kids don’t live here anymore, right?” Jon asks and Spencer shakes his head, no. “D’you think they’ll come home?”

“No,” Ryan says. “That would just bring even more attention to it all, and Mr and Mrs Urie won’t want that.”

“They’re very religious,” Spencer tells Jon, because sometimes they forget that Jon hasn’t always lived in Summerlin.

“Right,” Jon says, nodding his head as if that makes sense. Spencer’s not so sure it does, not really, because they may be religious but their youngest son just tried to kill himself, and surely nothing about that makes any kind of sense.

 

+

 

They’re riding their bikes up and down the driveway when the Urie’s station wagon pulls up. Mrs Urie hurries inside, her husband right behind her, but Brendon takes his time, leaning against the car and looking up at the elm trees that line the street.

The sun catches on his cheekbones, his lips, and he looks calm for the first time ever.

There are thick white bandages around his wrists and none of the boys can look away.

 

+

 

For a while it’s all anyone can talk about.

Spencer and Ryan and Jon collect the stories, no matter how unlikely, and store them away with the mental image of white bandages against tan skin. Pete Wentz talks about the psychology of it all, brings up the time he almost overdosed on painkillers from his mother’s bathroom cabinet, and they roll their eyes because this is different.

This is _Brendon._

Eventually everyone begins to lose interest; their parents go back to their country clubs and tennis games and it’s like nothing ever happened.

For Spencer and Ryan and Jon it’s not so easy to forget.

 

+

 

The first time they see Brendon again after he gets home from the hospital is the second day of senior year. They’re in the cafeteria, waving at people they recognize, answering questions about their summer, and then Spencer looks up and there he is, sitting outside on the grass, staring up at the sky, wearing the bandages and a pair of sunglasses, and looking for all the world like he’s somewhere else.

Spencer nudges Ryan, who nudges Jon, and the three of them sit and watch, ignoring everything around them, until Brendon looks in their direction and they all pretend to be doing something else.

It doesn’t occur to them to go and eat their lunch outside, to say hello, and by the time the bell rings, Brendon’s nowhere to be seen.

 

+

 

It’s Ryan who finds the records, thrown out with the Urie’s trash. He drags them up to Spencer’s room and they wait for Jon to arrive before spreading them out across the carpet. Kiss and Aerosmith and The Beatles. The Beach Boys and The Kinks. They listen to one record after the other, lying side by side and staring at the ceiling, and Spencer knows they all feel a little closer to Brendon, like they understand him that fraction better, but they don’t say anything.

They just listen.

 

+

 

The following Tuesday, Spencer gets a pass from his English teacher to go to the library and do some research for a class project. In reality he’s going to find Ryan and Jon who have skipped their own chemistry lesson to go smoke up behind the gymnasium, but he gets distracted on his way by the sight of Brendon leaning against the lockers in an empty hallway, eyes closed.

“Hi,” Spencer says before he can really think about what he’s doing.

Brendon’s eyes snap open and he stares at Spencer as if he’s not sure where he is or why anyone else is there.

“Hi,” he says eventually. His voice is deeper than Spencer expected to be, low and smooth. It suits him.

After a few moments in which Spencer can’t think of anything else to say that’s not _why did you do it?_ or _what did it feel like?_ , Brendon puts a foot against the locker behind him and pushes off.

As he walks past, he pauses, briefly.

“Bye,” he says.

“Bye,” Spencer echoes, his voice too quiet.

When Brendon’s footsteps have faded away to nothing, Spencer rushes to find Ryan and Jon, another piece to add to their ever-growing puzzle.

 

+

 

With November comes talk of Homecoming, girls giggling between classes and boys strutting down the halls pretending they’re too cool, rather than too afraid, to ask them to be their dates.

Spencer ends up agreeing to go with a pretty girl from homeroom called Haley who writes a note on a page ripped out the back of her math textbook. He blushes when he writes back _yes_ and at lunch Jon laughs at him until he falls off his chair. Jon himself is taking his neighbor, Cassie – “just as friends” – whilst Ryan has been working up the courage to ask Elizabeth Berg who sings and writes poetry with her best friend, Tennessee, during assembly.

They get their smartest suits from the back of their closets and hang them out to air. Jon’s dad agrees to let them take his Cadillac as long as they’re careful, and they forget about corsages until the last minute when Spencer’s mom asks what color they’ve bought and they have to dash into town to buy them. There are only white ones left, but the assistant says that white goes with anything so they don’t feel too bad.

On the night, they drive up to the abandoned movie theatre and pass around a joint until the girls start to laugh and blush, and when they get to the dance they’re all feeling loose, ready for whatever comes their way.

It’s a lot of fun. Tom, a friend of Jon’s from the football team, has a flask hidden in his jacket pocket, and he passes it around when he knows none of the chaperones are looking. Spencer dances with Haley, her arms wrapped around his shoulders and his hands placed awkwardly on her waist, and it’s nice, just swaying, his friends around him.

At one point he thinks he sees Brendon across the room, leaning close to Shane Valdez from the art department, but when he looks back up no one’s there and he decides he must have imagined it. He doesn’t think the Urie’s would let Brendon come to a dance anyway.

Jon wins Homecoming King and it’s Spencer’s turn to laugh until he cries, all the while cheering loudly because, however funny it might be, Jon’s still one of his best friends. He and Ryan spend the rest of the night calling him Your Highness and bowing dramatically until he threatens to make them walk home, smiling all the while.

They drop the girls’ home at the end of the night with promises of phone calls and kisses on cheeks, and then drive back to Spencer’s, careful not to wake his parents as they climb the stairs. They lie on the floor and retell their versions of the night’s events in whispers until they fall asleep where they are.

 

+

 

Spencer’s woken up by the sound of engines and a car door being slammed. He looks out of the window into the dawn light and sees Brendon getting out of a cab, his father paying the driver as his mother shouts and drags her son into the house by his sleeve.

There are grass stains on his back, Spencer notices with unease.

When everything’s silent again, he shuts his eyes and tries to sleep.

He can’t.

 

+

 

Ryan and Jon ask him to repeat what he saw over and over in the coming days. Brendon’s stopped coming to school, locked up inside his house with only his parents for company, and Spencer was the last one to see him. He thinks the other two might be jealous of that.

Spencer tells them everything so many times it begins to feel like fiction, and then he stops because he wants to keep it. Lock it away with the other snippets they’ve collected.

It isn’t until he’s partnered up with Shane Valdez in chemistry one lesson that he remembers thinking he saw Brendon at the dance. When he asks, Shane turns red, drops his head so that his hair falls into his eyes and stutters until Spencer asks him what happened.

“I guess we lost track of time. I…I didn’t mean to leave him there, not really, I just had to get home, you know? I had to get out of there.”

Spencer can feel himself beginning to frown and deliberately smoothes out his expression, waits for Shane to continue.

“You can’t tell,” Shane says, and Spencer shakes him head, because _no_ , he’ll tell Ryan and Jon, but he won’t _tell_.

As they’re leaving class, Shane turns back, pauses for a second and says, “I didn’t mean for this to happen. For him to get in so much trouble, I mean.”

Spencer bites his lip but doesn’t say anything.

 

+

 

It’s Jon’s idea to contact Brendon.

“We should write to him,” he says, throwing pebbles into the road from where they sit on the sidewalk. It’s become habit for them to watch the Urie house, even though they know they won’t see anyone. Spencer supposes that, in their own way, they’re trying to watch out for Brendon in the only way they can.

“His parents will just intercept the letters though,” Ryan says, but he sounds intrigued.

“So we send them in secret. He still gets those magazines, right? The music ones. We could put letters in the pages.”

It’s a good idea.

They spend hours deciding what to write. Ryan insists on doing the actual penmanship, and they crowd around him at Spencer’s desk, trying to think of the right sequence of words, the right phrases to let Brendon know that they’re here. That they haven’t forgotten him. That they know him even if they’ve never spoken.

Spencer sneaks out of the house the next morning, too early, and waits for the postman to come and go again. He picks the second magazine down, the one with John Lennon on the cover, and slips the envelope between an article on the Ramones and advertisement for Rogers Drums.

When he gets back into his room, he sits on the windowsill and watches until Mr Urie comes out to collect the mail, then he collapses back into bed and dreams of music and a boy with bandages around his wrists.

 

+

 

Three days later there’s a postcard stuck between the spokes of his bike. It’s a picture of a beach and there are words on the back that don’t make much sense but are beautiful all the same.

When Ryan comes over later, looking flushed and happy, he has one too. They wait until Jon’s finished helping his dad clear the gutters, arriving with mud on his cheeks and a postcard in his hands, before they lay them out on Spencer’s bed in a row, watching the words line up.

_Allow me to exaggerate a memory or two, when summers lasted longer than, longer than we do, when nothing really mattered except for me to be with you, but in time we all forgot and we all grew._

They spend the rest of the afternoon debating what it means, studying the slope of the letters and the dots on the i’s until Spencer’s mom calls them down for dinner and they reluctantly turn away.

 

+

 

They send back words of their own, ones Ryan comes up with during class, and they get Tennessee to write them out in her pretty, curling hand, on a piece of colored card they steal from the art supply closet.

_If all our life is but a dream, fantastic posing greed, then we should feed our jewelry to the sea, for diamonds do appear to be just like broken glass to me._

She gives it back to them at lunch, smiling as she asks what it means, and they laugh and say that they don’t know, because these words are between them and Brendon and no one else.

This time they tell Spencer’s parents that they have to study and then stay awake all night waiting for dawn and sneak outside together. They have a whispered debate about where best it should be placed before conceding to Ryan that it go in between the reviews and the soundtracks.

They fall asleep collapsed together on Spencer’s bed when they get back inside and don’t wake up until Jon’s mom calls to remind him that they’re going to his aunt’s birthday party.

 

+

 

They’re listening to music after school, arguing back and forth about whether it’s true that Pete Wentz was really caught making out with both Ashlee Simpson and Patrick Stump in the same day, when the phone rings. His parents are out, so Spencer grabs the one next to his bed, and then laughs into the receiver when Jon suggests that Ryan’s merely jealous Pete Wentz wasn’t making out with _him_.

“Hi,” the person on the other end of the phone says, and Spencer freezes because he knows that ‘hi’.

“Brendon,” he says, and Ryan and Jon stop what they’re doing, turn to look at him in surprise.

“Yeah,” Brendon laughs, “hi.”

“How are you?” he asks, and then has to move so he can hear properly when the other two jump on the bed to get as close as they can to the receiver.

Brendon laughs again, and it sounds sad. “Hm,” he says instead of answering, and Spencer wishes he could reach out and touch him. He’s only the other side of the street, but that’s _too far_. From the looks on Ryan and Jon’s faces, they feel the same way.

“What are you listening to?” he says instead, and Spencer blinks because he’d forgotten they had the stereo on.

“The Beatles,” he says. “Ryan’s choice.”

“Ryan has good taste,” Brendon says, and Ryan smiles smugly.

“Thank you,” he says, leaning closer to Spencer to speak directly into the phone, and Spencer can almost hear Brendon’s smile when he says, “I’m guessing Jon’s there, too.”

“Hey,” Jon says, and there’s a blush starting up his neck. Spencer wonders whether Jon’s thinking _he knows my name!_ as clearly as Spencer thinks he is, and then wonders whether he can mock him forever for it.

They’re silent for a few minutes and then Brendon sighs.

“I have to go,” he says, and for a second Spencer’s stomach drops as he thinks about what that could mean, why Brendon’s calling now of all times, but then he says, “I’ll call again tomorrow,” and the relief is overwhelming.

“Okay,” Ryan says, and he’s still smiling, though it’s softer now.

“Bye,” Jon says.

“Bye.”

As soon as the phone line goes dead the three of them sit and stare at each other for what feels like forever, none of them knowing quite what to say.

 

+

 

For the next two weeks Brendon calls everyday. Sometimes they exchange small talk - stories about people at school, what they studied in class - and sometimes they just play music down the line until one side has to hang up.

It’s everything and it’s not enough, and Spencer knows that Ryan and Jon feel the same way. When one of them can’t come over they look close to tears, and Spencer often feels guilty that, in some ways, Brendon is _his_ more than _theirs_.

Two weeks to the day of Brendon’s first call the phone doesn’t ring. The three of them sit on Spencer’s bed, piled on top of one another in a desperate attempt to keep calm and watch it for hours.

Spencer knows without a doubt that they’re all listening for sirens, too.

What comes instead is a knock on Spencer’s window that makes all three of them jump, and Ryan makes an ‘oof’ noise when Jon’s elbow ends up in his face.

And then there’s Brendon, sliding the window open and slipping inside feet first.

“Hey,” he says, and his smile’s completely real for the first time since that hot summer’s day.

Spencer’s not even aware he’s moving until his arms are around Brendon, his head buried in the crook of his neck, and he smells of sweat and grass despite being cooped up inside for too long. Spencer thinks Brendon was born to be outside.

Then there are more arms and _heat, heat, heat_ as Ryan and Jon join them, all of them squeezing too tightly and not tightly enough.

“So,” Brendon says, when they finally let go, “I came to say thank you. And goodbye.”

“Goodbye?” Spencer says, and his voice sounds desperate to his own ears.

Brendon looks at him in alarm, eyes big and dark, and Spencer thinks _you’re beautiful_ and _don’t go_.

“No, not…” Brendon says. “Not _that_.”

“Then what?” Ryan says, and he sounds as dejected as Spencer feels.

Brendon’s smile is blinding when he says, “I’m running away”, and for the first time Spencer notices the bag at his feet.

“You’re…what?” Jon says.

“Running away, Jon Walker. Getting out of that house and out of this town.”

“Right,” Spencer says, and he hates it, _hates it_ , but Brendon looks so happy at the idea, like his life is finally about to begin, and maybe, in some ways, it is.

Brendon takes a step back and his smile finally fades away.

“I meant it when I said ‘thank you’,” he says, and his eyes are shining with something close to tears. Or maybe Spencer’s are. “The three of you…you have _no idea_ …so, thank you.”

Spencer smiles, and he’s pretty sure he really is crying now, but then he thinks maybe they all are and that’s okay. The four of them have shared everything else, it seems, this last couple of months, if only from a distance. This is just one more moment to add to their collection.

Brendon picks up his bag then, goes to leave and turns back at the last second, darting forward to press a kiss to Jon’s lips, then Ryan’s, and finally Spencer’s, lingering for an instant longer, and Spencer can’t breathe.

“Bye,” he says when he pulls back, and this time it really does sound like an ending.

As he drops his bag, gets ready to follow, Ryan asks, “Write to us?” and the corner of Brendon’s mouth pulls up, more like a promise than a lie, before he disappears.

Spencer and Ryan and Jon watch him fade into the night, shoulder to shoulder, and Spencer thinks _maybe happy endings always hurt_.

 

+

 

Months later, after the Urie house has long since been emptied and sold, Spencer gets a postcard through the mail. It’s a picture of the Grand Canyon, and on the back it simply says, _you remind me of a former love that I once knew_.

He takes it up to his room, pulls out the box beneath his bed - the one filled with memories he’ll never forget - and places it gently on top.

Outside the sun is too hot and the ground is too dry and Spencer thinks _what a difference a year makes_ as he goes to meet Jon and Ryan, smiling all the while.


End file.
